2001: Ryan McGinness in Munich at Galerie de Miguel.
With early features such as the gallery visit to Ryan McGinness’ exhibition “Sign Age” in Munich, Beinghunted established a new format for online publishing.
Besides the regular news posts on Beinghunted, I thought it interesting to expand the content to ‘live’ coverage of art shows or gallery openings. Without any real size limitations–other than transfer rates–the scope of such a digital feature would be much broader than in a printed publication. The fact that the story could be published almost simultaneously to the actual event was and still is yet another advantage to print. People could virtually attend a gallery show, they could get an idea of the space and in many cases would still be in-time to visit if they happened to be around.
The first features on Beinghunted did not differ much from the rest of the content other than that the picture format was slightly bigger, and most importantly, that the images were not sourced but taken by myself or the various contributors over the years.
During one of my trips to New York in 2002 I went to see an exhibition at the Urban Experience museum where I was also allowed to take pictures for Beinghunted. While the format for our online features was still under development I decided to put together an online gallery that readers could click through. As simple as it sounds and looks now, no other website (there really weren’t too many ‘other’ sites…) had done anything similar.
The second feature on Beinghunted, a gallery visit to see Ryan McGinness’ show “Sign Age”, was published after the Urban Experience show, however, the photos were taken quite some time before then in the fall of 2001. Finding out that a gallery in my hometown would invite one of my favorite artists was quite the surprise and seeing the 360-panel mural that had previously been shown at Alife in New York a true highlight. I’m happy that I was able to retrieve the original scans of the photos I took almost twelve years ago. Due to the grain of the APS film I used at the time, the photos seem to have a vintage look-and-feel. For this re-view of this early Beinghunted feature I’m happy to display those shots in a much bigger format embedded in a modern slideshow.
Ryan McGinness, Beinghunted Features
Ryan McGinness: first post on Beinghunted, October, 2001
Ryan McGinness: Beinghunted Feature, 2002 (pop-up)
Sign Age: Ryan McGinness official website
The first ‘proper’ Beinghunted online feature, an interview with creative collective Rabbit & Redtree, was published in early 2003. The three-part interview with Earn Chen and James Lavelle that we published in 2005 was the first of its kind online and is the predecessor of the modern feature format used by many online publications nowadays.
Rabbit & Redtree: Beinghunted Feature, 2003
Surrender – James Lavelle & Earn Chen: Beinghunted Feature, 2005